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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 04/05/04 issue

E-gov efforts moving forward? Depends who you ask

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Graduation day is coming for the 25 Quicksilver initiatives, and some projects won’t be walking across the stage.

Many of the Office of Management and Budget’s e-government projects have failed to meet or have only partially met most of their objectives over the past two years, a senior General Accounting Office official told lawmakers last month. Because of that, the Quicksilver initiatives will fall short of full deployment this summer, said Linda Koontz, GAO’s director of information issues.

OMB and several e-government project managers disputed the GAO findings.

Only two projects, Grants.gov and IRS Free File, have achieved all their objectives, Koontz said. Another five accomplished more than half. Of the 91 objectives originally set for the projects, GAO found 33 have been met; 38 have been partially achieved; and for 17, no significant progress has been made. Auditors also noted that three objectives were no longer applicable to their projects.

“We didn’t see all positive progress,” she said at a recent hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census. “OMB and agencies are behind where they thought they were going to be, and some things will not be completed in their original time frame.”

Project Safecom, Consolidated Health Informatics and the Business Gateway are examples of slow-moving projects, she said.

Big difference

“There is quite a bit of difference in what the projects achieved,” Koontz said. “Some were more clever than others in putting down achievable objectives for the two-year period. Other objectives were much harder and were never achievable.”
Karen Evans
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“GAO’s evaluation does not accurately reflect where we are today.”

—OMB's Karen Evans
In an interview, Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for e-government and IT, said GAO’s evaluation likely came before her staff analyzed the project plans to make sure they were in step with the 2002 and 2003 e-government strategy.

“GAO’s evaluation does not accurately reflect where we are today,” Evans said. “We are working toward a technical deployment, which is a lot of what GAO looked at, but we also are dealing with [projects’ adoption by users]. These mean different things for each project.”

OMB officials and the CIO Council set Sept. 30 as a deadline for at least 80 percent of the projects to be fully deployed, hoping the initiatives would let agencies redirect $100 million in redundant spending. The administration also is requiring agencies to develop marketing plans, define full utilization and, for some projects, switch to a fee-for-service model.

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